Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (17 page)

Still another year, with the grandstand stretching farther up the track and the infield festooned with geometrical flower beds. And a Latin-American thunderbolt, named Kayak II, chalking up his win. Then a Sande-trained three-year-old, weighted with a feather, flew down the homestretch as Seabiscuit, the unlucky, coasted in for a win and nipped him at the wire. Stagehand wore the flowers that day…. The entertainment committee realized by now that the program was being a tremendous failure as well as a howling success that night at Shapiro’s. It was a failure in that nobody was remembering to keep on ordering drinks or food, a success in that for that brief hour every guest and every employee in the place lost himself completely.

There on the screen were flashing the most breathtaking moments of the turf’s last six years, the summit of man’s gambling urge and horses’ courage and endeavor. It was a program all of climaxes, one which wrung its audience out and left them limp as dishrags.

Afterwards nobody knew what time it was. Nobody knew exactly where he had been sitting or whose glass he had drained. By the time homely little Seabiscuit, twice cheated of his triumph, romped home on his gimpy old legs to win the Handicap for 1940 and become the greatest money winner of all time there was not—as the saying goes in Hollywood—a dry seat in the house.

When the lights came on everyone was applauding. Miss Withers and the inspector, Thorwald Nincom and his whole tableful—even Virgil Dobie and Jill were clapping, his right against her left, because at the same time they were holding hands under the table. The crowd kept on applauding as if they were going to insist on Seabiscuit’s taking a bow on the stage.

Then the roar of clapping hands died away, an audible silence spreading from the doors out and across the ballroom. Heads turned, people frowned, jerked back to reality….

There was something wrong out in the bar, some false note. The whisper ran from table to table, and people began to rise uncertainly. Photographers deserted their celebrities and ran across the dance floor, screwing fresh flash bulbs into their cameras….

It seemed that when the lights came back on somebody had noticed a girl lying on a big divan at the far side of the bar—a lush, dark girl partially undressed in red and gold. At first they thought that she was simply blotto and then they saw the red-gold rag caught on the balcony rail thirty feet above.

Nobody had seen her come out of the powder room. Nobody had heard anything, which wasn’t odd, considering the volume to which Mr Hernandez’ voice had been amplified. Nobody had noticed anything out of the way at all. And yet there she was.

All that anybody could be sure of was that Lillian’s neck was broken.

And
I HAD DONE A HELLISH THING,

And it would work ’em woe….

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

“L
OS ANGELES POLICE …
calling car 17 … car 17…. Call your station. That is all.”

The radio sergeant called Hollywood substation, speaking a bit thickly because he had one of Shapiro's “Special Blend” cigars in his mouth.

“Yeah, we come out here. Nothing to it. A dame just got lit up and fell offen a balcony. Name, Lillian Gissing; age, 24; address, Studio Club. Dead on arrival. What?”

The sergeant chewed deeply into his cigar, a frown creasing his smooth brown forehead. “Huh? Oh. Well, we talked to the maid who hangs out in the powder room. That’s what they call the can. Yeah. Big jigaboo right outa
Gone with the Wind.
She says she remembers this dame coming into the place spiffed. Tried to get her to take a fizz but all she could get down her was aspirin. A little while later while they were running some films downstairs she notices that the Gissing dame is sitting on a bench out on the balcony, about passed out. So she goes down to the kitchen to get her a cupa cawfee and when she comes back she’s gone. Yeah. Musta got dizzy and fell over. Left a hunka her dress caught on the balcony grillwork. Okay?”

He was about to hang up, but a question from the station stopped him cold. “Huh? No, of course nobody seen her. The lights in the place was turned down way low, and everybody was looking at the films. Nobody heard nothing neither. But they had the amplifier for the picture sound track turned way up high, and, besides, the Gissing dame lit on a big overstuffed couch. Yeah, only her head musta hit the back or something. Yeah. The way I figure it is—”

No matter how the sergeant figured it, matters were almost immediately taken out of his horny hands. For now the short, angry snarl of a squad-car siren sounded outside the glittering portals of Shapiro’s, and two serious-looking men entered without handing their hats to the checkroom girl. Or, for that matter, without taking their hats off. They were followed by a uniformed detail.

The sergeant recognized them at once as a lieutenant and a sergeant from Homicide Bureau downtown and realized that the case which he had just washed up so neatly and so much to the satisfaction of the management was reopened again. But good.

“Somebody phoned in a beef,” was all the information he received as the lieutenant sent him back to cruising.

It must have been a very convincing beef because a few minutes later Coroner Panzer arrived, wearing the top of his pajamas for a shirt. He, too, looked extremely serious.

The management was annoyed. The guests were annoyed, those of them who had remained after the unfortunate accident which now appeared to be something else again. Most annoyed of all the guests was Thorwald L. Nincom when he was advised that the presence of himself and his party was requested upstairs in the banquet room. Mr Nincom threatened to telephone to Mayor Bowron; he threatened to telephone to Governor Olson. “Do you know who I am?”

The officer knew and he was very unhappy about it. But it would take only a few minutes.

When Mr Nincom and his guests reached the small banquet room upstairs they found that a number of other interested, and interesting, parties were there. Among them were Virgil Dobie and Jill, young Buster Haight and Mr Wilfred Josef.

“I’m not going to say anything without a lawyer present,” Willy Abend was insisting. “According to the Bill of Rights—”

“Willy, be quiet!” cried Melicent Manning. “Don’t you see what’s happening? We’re being murdered off, one by one….”

Mona Firsk leaned close to her husband. “Frankie, you don’t think that one of
us
is—you know, the murderer?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t suppose it’s you,” she whispered, a faint note of disappointment in her voice. “You wouldn’t have the nerve.”

Douglas August said nothing, but sat and picked quietly at the edge of his bandage.

Harry Wagman, the agent, made one or two futile attempts to draw Mr Nincom into a conversation about the abilities and charms of the hyperthyroid redhead who sat beside him with her hands folded and stared wonderingly at everything. After a while an officer came and told her that she could go. Which she did, briskly. It was quite obviously no time to work on Mr Nincom, no matter how suitable she might be for the part of Lizzie Borden.

And the door of the manager’s office remained firmly closed, though now and then the faint rumble of voices sounded within. Finally a fat and self-righteous colored woman emerged, then hurried out as if the bloodhounds were after her.

Virgil Dobie and Jill stared at each other, and Buster Haight stared at Jill. The silence grew thicker and thicker.

From the ballroom downstairs they could hear the orchestra for a while, and then that, too, died away. Festivities at Shapiro’s were definitely over for the evening. A waiter came up past the bored officer who guarded the door and wanted to know if anybody wanted to order a drink or anything before they closed the bar.

“If it’s all right … ?” Frankie Firsk said dubiously, looking at the law.

“Go ahead—my only instructions is to keep you here.” So they all had drinks, with the exception of Virgil Dobie.

“I think I’ll stick to ginger ale,” he said to Jill, and did.

There was a little flush of conversation while the drinks were being tossed off, and then the silence was heavy upon them again. Josef, he of the singed beard, broke it momentarily when Buster Haight struck a match to a cigarette close beside him. “Don’t do that!” shrieked Mr Josef. “I can’t stand being near fire again.” And he gave a sidelong glance at Virgil Dobie.

“Sorry,” Dobie said. “Well, I—I’m sorry.” There didn’t seem to be much of anything more to say. Buster took his cigarettes and matches to the other side of the room and resumed his close study of the way Jill’s eyelashes swept upward from her cheek.

Then suddenly the office door opened, and out came the two homicide detectives, the lieutenant still wearing his hat. With them, and evidently on good terms, was Inspector Oscar Piper. And Miss Withers.

A great light dawned on Mr Nincom. “I might have known it!” he cried accusingly.
“You’re
responsible for our being kept here while everybody else went home. You and your fantastic ideas—”

“All right, all right,” said the man with the hat. “We won’t keep anybody long….”

Mr Nincom turned to Harry Wagman, his face mottled with red. “She’s fired!” he gave out in a stage whisper.

“She’s got a contract,” Wagman retorted. “Iron bound.”

“Staying away two days voids the contract!”

“All right, please!” said the lieutenant again. “That can wait. All we want to know is, what do you know about this Lillian Gissing?”

Nobody said anything.

“Who saw her last?”

Again nobody said anything. Buster Haight put his cigarette out and deposited the butt neatly in the cuff of his trousers. Then he realized that somebody was pointing at him. It was Virgil Dobie.

“I saw her with that kid at the bar,” he said.

Buster answered questions for ten busy minutes. All he knew was that Lillian had been drinking pretty heavily because she wanted to get brave. And she’d taken something out of her purse and gone upstairs….

He hadn’t seen her again. But he’d been watching the pictures. Like everybody else.

“Do you think she had an appointment with somebody?” the inspector put in.

Buster didn’t think so. “She just wanted to get brave….”

The two local detectives looked at each other and nodded. Oscar Piper nodded, too, though not quite as firmly. “Seems pretty clear that she was trying to get brave enough to commit suicide, then,” said the sergeant.

“Yeah, and that would account for her not screaming when she fell. People don’t yell when they know they’re going to fall.”

“Are we to be kept here all night while we listen to the reasons why a stenographer took her own life in a fit of drunken melancholia?” burst in Mr Nincom.

The officers looked at each other and then at the inspector. “Well,” said the lieutenant slowly, “much as we’d like to play ball with you fellows in the big town…”

Piper looked around for Miss Withers, but she wasn’t in view. A moment later they heard from her in the shape of a commotion outside on the balcony, the sound of running feet, the irate voice of a policeman and then a tremendous crash.

Miss Withers’ voice came triumphantly above everything else. “Look!” she was crying. “Look at that!”

When Piper got out onto the balcony he looked down into the empty bar, straight down where an ornamental pot holding a small orange tree now reposed in the center of a collapsed divan.

“She threw it over—” began the guardian of the door in a very injured tone. “Just ups with it, and over it goes!” He held Miss Withers’ arm with a firm grip.

“Of course I did!” insisted that lady, still triumphant. “That pot couldn’t have weighed over a hundred pounds, or I wouldn’t have been able to lift it. But look—it was heavy enough to break the legs of that divan downstairs. And you mean to stand there and tell me that a hundred-and-thirty-pound girl could land on it without any damage at all?”

“Leave go of her,” said the lieutenant wearily as he took off his hat and mopped his head. “I’m afraid she’s right.”

“She didn’t fall,” agreed his partner slowly. “She didn’t jump and she wasn’t pushed.”

“And somebody tore off a piece of her dress and hooked it on this balcony so it would look as if she fell!” the schoolteacher continued. “Which makes it add up to murder.”

Behind them, from the door marked “Mesdames” appeared Dr Panzer, with his sleeves rolled up. “She’s right,” said the coroner. “About the girl not falling anyway. She hasn’t got a bruise on her body, so she didn’t fall thirty feet. But her neck’s broken.”

“Or, in other words,” interrupted Miss Hildegarde Withers dryly, “she has a fracture dislocation of the second cervical vertebra and lesion of the spinal cord?”

Coroner Panzer stared at her. “Why—yes,” he admitted. “I mean—But—”

“I’m only quoting your own report from your examination of the body of Saul Stafford,” the schoolteacher explained. “I can remember the rest of it too. Let me see—‘Anterior surface of the body—negative. Abdominal cavity…’”

“Wait a minute,” cut in Dr Panzer. “Lady, I don’t know who you are or how you got in this thing—”

“Neither do I,” grinned the lieutenant. “But go on, Doc.”

“Anyway,” said Dr Panzer, “there’s one difference between the Stafford case and this Gissing girl. I’ll show you.”

He beckoned, led the way back through the door into the powder room where the body of Lillian Gissing was laid neatly out on a lounge. Briskly and impersonally Dr Panzer drew back the sheet to disclose the dead girl’s face. “Notice the marks on the cheek,” he said, pointing with his pencil. “One, two, three, four—four fingernail scratches on her left cheek, running from jawbone to ear.”

“Meaning violence?” demanded the lieutenant.

Panzer shrugged. “It could be. Or the girl could have clutched her own face”—he demonstrated—“like this.”

“She couldn’t break her own neck, could she?” demanded Inspector Oscar Piper.

The lieutenant hastily introduced them. “Inspector Piper is out here from New York on account of an old case of his—where a woman got her neck broken from a five-foot fall.”

Panzer frowned deeply. “Three cases, eh? Well, maybe. But I don’t believe that it is physically possible for any person to break another’s neck. The neck muscles are too strong—”